Where Is Smedley Butler When We Need Him?

Once again, X provokes me to think about something for multiple days:

The final segment of the TAL episode was a piece by one of my favorite NPR correspondents (besides Robert Krulwich), Alex Blumberg. I won't go into detail, but it's about the perfectly legal (if not vaguely pornographic) practice of naked shortselling, which essentially amounts to check kiting but with stocks. It just goes to show how something which is considered fraud when a little guy does it is perfectly acceptable for those who purport to be running things. Fuck 9/11 Truthers and the Kennedys, If you want to talk about bladder problems massive evil conspiracies, look no further than the financial sector. Whether bombs or planes brought down the towers or whether the shots really came from the grassy knoll neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket. But when powerful people can simply create money out of thin air to manipulate markets, it robs the savings of every hardworking person who busts their ass everyday to create the wealth which actually backs those dollars.

The same institutions who are robbing us (on the stock market and housing markets, crashing and burning and taking a big bonus and fancy severance package then leaving the mess for Congress to bail out) are the very institutions that are financing our descent into fascism.

The rich people (the Bushes, for example) who are getting richer at our expense are also the same families that are pushing us towards ever tighter restriction of our freedoms. What's more, in many cases, their families have been trying this same shit for nearly a century.

Here's as far back as I can trace it factually, without any speculation :

In 1934, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler testified before congress that he had been approached by a consortium of wealthy businessmen with a plan to overthrow FDR and install corporate-fascism as the dominant form of government in the U.S.

Butler, a war hero who was fantastically popular among WWI veterans, was asked by the conspiracy to lead the Liberty League, a veteran's group that was expected to reach a membership total of 500,000 (in what was then the near future). The expressly and willfully stated string attached to this "honor" was that he would lead those veterans in a putsch to force FDR into making an executive order that would appoint a Secretary General of the United States as a new permanent "super" cabinet post. Such an appointment would effectively make the President merely a figurehead, and FDR would withdraw "for health reasons". Since the peacetime US Army was then only 135,000 strong, such a coup would have a reasonable expectation of succeeding. Similar actions had been successful in Germany and Italy just a few years before.

The House UnAmerican Activities Committee concluded that his testimony was truthful and supported by fact, that such a coup had indeed been planned. Despite that finding, Congress chose to take no further action. They censored their own report, declaring portions of it classified for reasons of national security and keeping them from the public.

Butler maintained that his own testimony was censored and edited in the final public report. He publicly stated that he had enumerated to Congress the names of the businessmen and companies bankrolling the proposed coup, and that those names were stricken from the report. Among those he indicated were Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush) and such business institutions as Heinz, Birds' Eye, and Maxwell House.


Primary source: BBC radio story on Smedley Butler. Here it is set to some simple graphics on YouTube...




I mention the above partly because of our current financial crisis and impending election. Things are quite likely to go even more sour in the near future.

The rather fraudulent bail-out bill in front of congress today would technically nationalize all banks, allow Paulson to nationalize an unlimited amount of private debt, and allow Foreign Governments to cash in many of the debts we owe them for immediate payment at 50 cents on the dollar, all at the taxpayers expense. Rather than bailing out the economy, this would bail out specific millionaires as Paulson sees fit, and nothing would stop them from reaping huge bonuses for having pitched their companies debts onto the American public. I'm no economics expert, so here's my source on that for you to check out yourself.

Addendum: Here's a cool wikipedia page I just found on the Business Plot that Butler blew the whistle on. There's even a photo of the burning shanty town after the battle between "The Bonus Army" and the US Army.